LEDs, cathode ray tubes, blinky lights – move over. Once you’ve seen dancing animated black goo frolicking in space to sound, you never go back. Love Hultén has been plus-ing their custom instruments with ferrofluids, and the results are simply magical.
From yesterday, there’s this beautiful creation with a KORG minilogue xd inside. (There’s also a Collider according to the notes, which I think is the Source Audio delay/reverb.)
This isn’t the first time Love has added ferrofluids to a custom build. Over the summer, Love transformed a Twisted Electronics Deton8 into a ferrofluid-animated drum synth, with these delicious results:
The inspiration for all of this, says Love, is DAKD Jung’s wondrous ferrofluid-display Bluetooth speaker project:
Now, to be honest, I haven’t been keeping up with DIY ferrofluid sonic animations – though seeing this, I wonder what I’ve been doing with my life instead. Fortunately, Hackaday were keeping abreast of all things ferrofluids and naturally, you have to do some work to get results this good, as Donald Papp explained in June:
Ferrofluid drum synth dances to the beat [Hackaday]
(Hey, did they get rid of the hyphens in their site title? Seems like a failure of brand recognition, like someone turning a known name into an acronym, but what do I know?)
Anyway, if all this ferrofluid business is freaking you out, Love also has an absolutely gorgeous “Chunky Mother-32.” That commission combines a Moog Mother 32, a Roland TR-08, and a Hologram Electronics Microcosm, plus a pull-out keybed. I mean, sure, inMusic could make Moog stuff cheaper theoretically, but what about making it an order of magnitude more expensive?
And… two words. MIDI. Crab.
Honestly, the ultimate evolution of displays is certainly for everything to turn into crabs. Don’t ask me, ask an evolutionary biologist; carcinisation is science, y’all.
And, actually, having turned this site into an acronym and had it survive for nearly 20 years, I expect next it should turn into a crab. (Crab Digital Music? Dunno.)
It’s the future of music.
Previously in Love Hultén news:
Get lost here: